THERE’S popcorn on the plate with lamb “julep” at new Bloomingdale Road. It isn’t a bar snack, but a $24 “main” dish. Welcome to Dining Out 2008, an ordeal that can make adults feel as if they’ve stumbled into a cafeteria for toddlers.

Restaurants by the score treat customers as if they were tweens or even babies. “Small plates” rule. Waiters offer to “explain our menu,” and then read us the entire document aloud word by word, down to the “sustainable products” disclaimer.

Menu writers work on the premise that folks old enough to have attended the Joe Louis-Max Schmeling fights have never eaten out before. Why else would the one at Forge, a new downtown spot with a serious lineup from Marc Forgione, inform us that categories of dishes are intended for specific purposes – “to start,” “to follow,” “to continue” and “to finish”?

Or that at Bloomingdale Road, tartars of striped bass and beef represent – Aha! moment alert – “SEA” and “LAND”?

Dishes, meanwhile, are formulated for those with culinary ADD. The worst perpetrators are downtown, but they’re streaming north.

It’s one thing to encounter “cheeseburger spring rolls” at Delicatessen, the scenester joint at Prince and Lafayette where customers will consume anything solid and sweet after a night of boozing and clubbing.

It’s another to find items like “fusion chicken skins” at Tonic East, a bar-food joint in the sober environs of Third Avenue and 29th Street. The delicacy incorporates soy mustard, mozzarella and peanut sauce. Enjoy – if you don’t gag just reading it!

Bloomingdale Road is no snack bar but a three-level restaurant on the former Aix site at Broadway and 88th. It boasts a respected chef, Ed Witt.

Alas, like other places that should know better, it takes the “small plates for sharing” route. It’s based on the theory that diners of all ages no longer want appetizers followed by entrees, but prefer to “graze” like insatiable cows for hours on end.

Maybe they do in the Meatpacking District or on Avenue A. But except at dedicated tapas bars, it almost never works north of 14th Street.

Gray Kunz, once a four-star chef, threw in his lot last year with moronically named Grayz on West 54th Street. Its mostly small-plates format bombed so badly, Kunz and his menu are now gone; the new lineup, announced last week, unashamedly lists “appetizers” and “entrees.”

The lesson was lost on Bloomindale Road. The first item on its menu is “chicken lollipops” served “Buffalo style” with blue [sic] cheese fondue. (Morsels on sticks are all the rage, thanks maybe to the popularity of the East 61st Street bar-snackery called Lollipop – or the Lil’ Wayne hit about a different school of oral gratification).